Abstract: The article examines several short stories from Italo Calvino's collection Difficult Loves, in which the main theme is difficulty. For Calvino, difficulty is comprehensive and does not only characterize the love relationship between two people – there is difficulty in communicating with the other, but also in communicating with oneself. It is difficult to accept the surrounding reality, which often does not meet the expectations of the characters. This work offers a different perspective of the stories through the prism of two key texts: Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, and Pascal Bruckner’s Perpetual Euphoria. Barthes’ figures, on the one hand, represent a thematic guide related to the specific situation in each story; on the other, they symbolize the difficulty of communication between the characters of the stories. The “figures,” carriers of a given situation or condition, are designed against the background of Bruckner’s vision of happiness and it’s difficult to define nature. This vision also fits into Calvino’s vision of unstable happiness, insofar as the characters of his stories are united by one thing: happiness either eludes them or is lacking, ultimately one thing is certain and inevitable: banality and resignation. Each story is subjected to a content analysis related to a given “figure” of Barthes. Additionally, Bruckner’s and Denis De Rougemont’s similar ideas about happiness are included in the analysis, although De Rougemont frames the question of happiness by relating it to the theme of love and marriage.
Processing Request
No Comments.